Down with girls!

The Americans like to conduct their arguments at the top of their voices so that the shock waves reverberate across the pond. The latest book to cause a storm in the States - The War Against Boys, by Christina Hoff Sommers (Simon and Schuster) - hasn't even been published yet and already it is being serialised in the Sunday Times.

In the book, Hoff Sommers accuses the American education system in general, but feminist scholars in particular, of promoting gender reform that leaves boys out in the cold. Schools have spent so much time making sure girls feel comfortable, she says, that they have lost sight of what it is that boys need. While teachers fuss about sexual harassment, and otherwise try to impose "new versions of manhood" on their charges, boys are left lagging seriously behind their sisters. What is needed now, she insists, is a return to "discipline, respect and moral guidance".

Take a close look, however, and her analysis quickly runs into the sand: the fact is, male under-achievement at school predates modern feminism by centuries. Way back in 1693 John Locke was bewailing the fact that boys had such trouble learning Latin while girls took so easily to French (he saw it as a failure of method, not a failure of intellect). A schools inquiry in 1868 commented, "Girls come to you to learn; boys have to be driven." And as recently as the 60s the boys' 11 plus results were "skewed" to make sure that grammar schools weren't filled with diligent girls.

Feminism did have an impact, though - on the ambitions of girls. During the 80s girls' maths and science results really took off; and by the beginning of the 1990s, they were level pegging with boys. This might not have mattered had it not taken place within a rapidly changing industrial and social scene. Boys who prefer action to books can no longer be absorbed into the shrinking manufacturing sector and the army. The world of work wants soft skills not hard muscles.

It is against this background that Hoff Sommers wants to return to a golden age in which boys are boys and girls know their place. In an earlier article in Atlantic Monthly Hoff Sommers said: "To impugn his desire to become 'one of the boys' is to deny that a boy's biology determines much of what he prefers and is attracted to."

This view of masculinity as something pre-programmed, immutable, and yet at the same time capable of being fatally damaged by too much contact with femininity, lay at the heart of much of the initial reaction to "the gender gap" in this country in the mid 90s. Male education experts called for recruitment campaigns to get more men into teaching and for changes in the literature curriculum (not so many chick books like Wuthering Heights). They then jumped all over a single experiment in which Eastwood school at Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, divided its boys and girls for a number of key subjects. The results showed the same sort of improvements that might have been achieved by any reasonably focused managerial change (the fact that the improvement was much greater for girls was somehow glossed over) and gender separation was hailed as a way forward for boys. David Blunkett promised to "consider encouraging similar schemes".

Perhaps he then took a look at the rather larger-scale experiments in the inner cities in which some boys and girls have always been educated separately - single-sex schools. The evidence here is a lot less encouraging. Parents and children alike have voted with their feet. A macho all-male environment is not popular and doesn't improve results for boys. Indeed most of the worst results in the country are to be found in the boys' schools. In Hackney all but one of them have now closed; in Islington, one of the most famous - Highbury Grove - is now a co-ed and, in Tower Hamlets, where a large Asian population ensures a higher level of parental support for single sex schooling, all three boys schools are considered by Ofsted to be failing. One is already in "special measures" and the other two have "serious weakness".

In boys' schools, leaders emerge. They quickly establish an alternative authority, in opposition to the school, and they exact obedience to this anti- school ethos from the lower ranks. And it is the boys in the lower ranks who suffer. It is they who are bullied, teased, and forced to conform to the dominant masculine ideology of the group.

Parents whose sons have been recruited into the ranks of the anti-school army are rightly alarmed by this effect. The boys know what is happening but most feel powerless against the effect of peer group pressure. I asked a group of 14-year-olds at a school in Hackney what would happen if half the boys in the school thought that scoring goals in football would make them appear less hard, less manly. They all responded in the same way: the boys would avoid scoring. Not one boy suggested that winning would be more important than being laughed at. As one said: "They would do very badly. Most people are always out to look good. Most of their decisions depend on it."

So what is a parent to do? Those who are watching their daughters read Proust while signing up for classes in rocket science are hardly likely to buy the Hoff Sommers approach. Holding girls back is not going to push boys forward. Yet it is dispiriting to find that, at the age of 12, your son's language skills have gone into reverse and he seems to be interested only in mixing music or playing football. Hoff Sommers is right to recognise that this is now a problem both for boys themselves and for society at large, but it is the goal posts that have moved, not the players. In firing a broadside against feminist educationalists she is attacking the very people who are closest to finding a way through.

Madeleine Arnott, from the University of Cambridge school of education, has spent the last four years running a research project aimed at improving boys' attitudes to education. For Arnott, the issues lie in the different ways in which boys and girls regard school and themselves: "Girls want different things from education; they are seeking autonomy, autonomy is the pay off for literacy. What is the pay off for boys? How can we help boys to recognise that the world has changed, to adapt to it, and find a path through?"

It is this kind of thinking that is so desperately needed in schools. Martin Cribb is head of learning and school development in Tower Hamlets, London, and knows that providing a more "masculine" environment for boys is not the answer. Indeed it is a traditional, macho, masculine style that lies at the heart of the problem: "It is hard to recruit staff into a tough, inner city school. You don't want macho staff, you want people who are good teachers."

According to Arnott's research this is the right emphasis: "There is evidence that the major problem for boys is that they are holding on to very traditional masculine identities. Some are changing but very few compared to the girls. The world has changed. The question we have to ask is, are schools addressing this, are they helping the boys to change or are the traditional masculine values of the schools actually holding change back? Research indicates that it is not the sex of the teacher that matters but the approach. Male teachers with traditional views on masculinity may actually be confirming and colluding with laddish culture rather than challenging it."

Arnott is right, Hoff Sommers is wrong. As Adrienne Katz discovered in her research into teenage boys (Leading Lads, 1999) it is the boys who are less traditional in their masculinity, who are happier, more confident and more engaged with school. Perhaps it is time then, to start working with boys in schools on more useful ways of "looking good". Projects aimed at getting boys to talk about masculinity and what it means to them have now started in a handful of schools. It is too soon to tell whether they will close the gender gap but one thing we do know is that the boys like it. They don't want to be disciplined, they want to be listened to.